Stephane Couture, Pour l’accès libre à la connaissance scientifique, Alternatives, January 29, 2009. Read it in the original French or Google's English.

Ivan Oransky, RIP: The Medscape Journal of Medicine, an open access pioneer, stops publishing new papers, Scientific American , January 31, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  See our past posts on MJM and George Lundberg.

The new Brandenburg Higher Education Act, adopted last month, refers to the fostering of OA as a forward-looking part of a university's mission.  Read it in German or Google's English.

FOBID (Netherlands Library Forum) and VOI©E (Vereniging van Organisaties die Intellectueel eigendom Collectief Exploiteren, or Netherlands Association of Organisations for the Collective Management of Intellectual Property Rights) have issued a joint declaration on the digitization of orphan works.  From yesterday's press release: From yesterday's declaration: Comment .

I attended and liveblogged the public sessions of the National Academies' Board on Research Data and Information meeting (Washington, DC, January 29-30, 2009). Many of the presentations are also online.

Bavi Selk, Physicists push for free online journal access, Daily Texan , January 30, 2009.

Klaus Graf, Embargo-Zeitschriften: Kein Open Access, Archivalia , January 30, 2009.  An argument for libre OA licenses.  Because these licenses are irreversible, they prevent publishers from adding access restrictions to an article retroactively.  Read it in German or Google's English.

ShareGeo launched, a press release from EDINA, January 28, 2009.  Excerpt: PS:  ShareGeo is the successor to EDINA's GRADE (Geospatial Repository for Academic Deposit and Extraction).  See our past posts on GRADE and EDINA's other geospatial projects.

Clay Shirky reprints a message from the Wikileaks announcement list: Comment .  This is excellent news.  It's not the first project to provide retroactive OA to CRS reports, but it's probably the largest.  I don't say "retroactive and unauthorized OA" because CRS reports are uncopyrightable from birth, and no permission or authority is needed.

Arthur Sale, Beyond Open Source, a slide presentation at Free as in Freedom (Hobart, Tasmania, January 20, 2009).

The American Library Association (ALA) Office for Information Technology Policy has launched Google Books Settlement --"a small informational site about the Google Books settlement."  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  It contains the settlement documents and a blog to track new developments and commentary.